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I've followed the instructions here: http://guac-dev.org/doc/gug/installing-guacamole.html

This says

Guacamole is separated into two pieces: guacamole-server, which provides the guacd proxy and related libraries, and guacamole-client, which provides the client to be served by your servlet container, usually Tomcat.

guacamole-client is available in binary form, but guacamole-server must be built from source. Don't be discouraged: building the components of Guacamole from source is not as difficult as it sounds, and the build process is automated. You just need to be sure you have the necessary tools installed ahead of time. With the necessary dependencies in place, building Guacamole only takes a few minutes.

And then proceed to describe how to install guacamole-server and use it. I can now go to http://localhost:8080/guacamole/ and access the server and see which clients have connected.

How do I connect a client though? I see no documentation of where the remote desktop needs to browse to in order to run the guacamole-client?

Or have I totally misunderstood this?

Matt B
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2 Answers2

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The key phrase in the quoted documentation is:

... guacamole-client, which provides the client to be served by your servlet container, usually Tomcat.

"guacamole-client" is the web application and the client. When a user visits the URL for your Guacamole server, logs in, and clicks on a connection, they are connected to the corresponding remote desktop via Guacamole's JavaScript client which is served to their browser like any other web application.

I can now go to http://localhost:8080/guacamole/ and access the server and see which clients have connected.

The list you see when you first log in to your Guacamole server is not the list of clients that have connected; it is the list of connections to remote desktops which are available. If you click on one of those connections, you will be connected using Guacamole's own built-in JavaScript client.

How do I connect a client though? I see no documentation of where the remote desktop needs to browse to in order to run the guacamole-client?

The remote desktop does not need to do anything - Guacamole will simply connect to it. You can see a video of the overall user experience on the Guacamole website which may hopefully clear things up for you:

https://vimeo.com/116207678

Overall:

  1. You deploy guacamole-client (the web application) and install guacamole-server (the remote desktop proxy that the web application uses in the backend). The combination of these two pieces of software makes up a typical Guacamole server.
  2. You and your users can log in through the web application and connect to remote desktops using a web browser.
  3. You do not need to explicitly run a client.
Mike Jumper
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  • Thanks Mike. After congratulating myself in installing Guacamole, I think I have misunderstood it's purpose. I was expecting to be able to go to the web application on a remote desktop and it would run a vnc server via the browser allowing me to remotely access the desktop from the computer that I had install guacamole on. It sounds like I still need to set up a vncserver on the remote desktop. If this is the case, the guacamole is probably not what I need. – Matt B Jan 21 '16 at 06:07
  • @MattB That would be somewhat illogical. The way Guacamole works, is that it's some kind of gateway. You can have multiple devices with VNC servers, and configure the Guacamole server so that an user has access to these. You can then connect to the Guacamole server with a HTML5 client, so you can access all these devices. – Paul Aug 15 '16 at 09:21
  • @MattB You might put the Guacamole server on your remote device (along with VNC), and then connect to it with HTML5 (I believe). But the use of Guacamole is creating an HTML5 gateway to devices, these can either be VNC or RDP or .. or .. so it doesn't aim to replace established remote desktop servers/protocols, only create an easy (HTML5) connection to them. – Paul Aug 15 '16 at 09:24
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It looks like this Internet -> Guacamole server (on the local network) -> Desktop pc

I installed Guacamole in a vmware enviroment on Ubuntu. There is a file in /etc/guacamole what is called user-mapping.xml In that file you add or edit the connections available to the user you want. A connection for that user must be set between the <connection> tags

Bram B
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